Retail Store Dummy Cameras
Toronto. The other day I had a chat with John Linsky who had discovered a forgotten dummy camera in his collection (more on that in a later post). John’s mention of dummies brought back a wealth of memories.
The late Bill Belier once mentioned that post war, good German cameras were both expensive and in short supply. One solution was for the companies to make and sell dummy cameras which were much cheaper and could serve to show the features to prospective buyers. Some times the camera or lens was cut in half with a fine jeweller’s saw to show the internal mechanism.
Over size mock ups as you see here served as advertising for the various models. In December 2006 at our annual show and tell meeting, Shelton Chen showed a couple of these outsized camera mock ups plus a bunch of models with clear transparent plastic bodies showing off the camera’s internal mechanics.
N.B. When I first created this web site about two decades ago, I bought and followed a book called HTML for Dummies … HTML stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language, a subset of a markup language used by printing presses in those days. HTML (and other software, plus your browser) gives the site page its “look” and allows hot links to other pages and web sites.
